Gee-Gees

Lynn: ‘Forget those Rapture fanatics. Here are better things to worry about. But have some champagne first!’

☞ You can relax about giant asteroids hurtling toward Earth. It seems we may be able to deflect them before too long. But an Atlantic tsunami far worse than the current Indian Ocean catastrophe is just waiting for a 500 billion ton rock in the Canary Islands to drop. You should really click the link above (and make out your will). (Except that, of course, it very likely won’t drop for hundreds of years – one estimate puts the chances in any given century at 5% – and there’s not much point worrying about it, because my plan for a continuous convoy of tanker trucks pouring epoxy glue into the fissure seems not to be workable.)

And then, while you’re feeling smug that you live nowhere near the Atlantic coast, click here. There aren’t many supervolcanic spots around the world (‘the last supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in Sumatra . . . ten thousand times bigger than Mt. St. Helens’), but one of them lies under Yellowstone National Park. It erupts roughly every 600,000 years – most recently 640,000 years ago.

Cataclysms like these are called Gee-Gees – Global Geophysical Events.